MailChimp’s Personal Annual Reports

For the last few years, we’ve made an annual report to share all the awesome, weird stuff MailChimp got up to during the previous 360-something days. When we were getting this year’s annual report ready to go, we thought it would be cool to let our users in on the fun, too—and, while we’re at it, maybe even empower them for more greatness in 2015.

Every user who paid for MailChimp services in 2014 gets a personalized annual report. And each report details all sorts of useful information about the campaigns you sent in 2014, divided into 5 categories: By the numbers (opens, clicks, subscriber growth), Your greatest hits (highest open and click rates, most viewed campaign), Your audience (most engaged customers, subscriber hubs), and Fun facts (biggest fan, best month, most common subject line words). Hopefully it’ll be an eye-opening trip down memory lane.

We always like to try out our own features, so we ran a report for our own UX Newsletter. Here’s a look at some of the stuff we learned:

First up: Across the 17 campaigns we sent in 2014, the UX Newsletter gained 14,055 subscribers (272% growth), with an average open rate of 55.4% (industry average: 16.3%) and an average click rate of 10.2% (industry average: 1.9%). Not bad!

In the report’s "greatest hits" section, we learned that a subject line with a call to action ("What UX book or article influenced you in 2014?") got the newsletter’s highest open rate (81.9%), and that February’s experimentation issue got the best click rate (16.3%). Meanwhile, people keep coming back to January’s iteration issue, making it the campaign with the longest life. Our UX team will probably revisit that one to see why their readers have found it so valuable.

It was neat to learn that the six cities with the newsletter’s highest concentrations of subscribers were all concentrated together. These folks probably bump into each other on the subway all the time—do we need to develop a secret hand signal?

We also learned that Friday is the UX Newsletter’s biggest day for opens and clicks. You might assume this means they should always send on Friday. But what it likely means is that they usually send on Friday, or at least late in the week—and, looking at their archives, it seems they mostly do. And maybe that’s best! But taking a cruise through some of our Send Time Optimization data might help, too.

We’re hoping these annual reports give users a chance to take a look back and admire all the hard work they did in 2014. But we also hope the stats and insights will point toward areas where they might want to do more, or just do better, in the new year. If your report inspires you to kick your email into higher gear in 2015, dig into our Knowledge Base, research documents, and even this very blog to learn more.

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Team at MailChimp – Can I just say THANK YOU! That was such a nice touch to get this annual report. You have already done the work I set for myself over the winter break FOR ME. Which posts had the highest open rate? CHECK! Which posts were referred to over the longest period of time? CHECK! How much did I grow my list? (800%!) Thank you for this. It is simple. It is useful. It was unexpected. My gratitude.